For devices that capture video, a frame rate of video capture such as 30, 60, or 120 frames per second may be required. Such frame rate video capture may require the device to provide a high computational load and use large amounts of power. Furthermore, much of the video and image processing performed by the device may require lower resolution images than captured by the image sensor of the device. In some implementations, image signal processor (ISP) architectures may provide for downscaling the capture images or video frames early in the image processing pipeline and before the image data is stored in the main image memory (e.g., dynamic random access memory or DRAM) of the device. Such early downscaling may save memory, memory access bandwidth, and unnecessary computational loads for the rest of the processing chain or pipeline.
In some examples, the captured image from the image sensor of the device may be in a Bayer pattern, a similar red-green-blue (RGB) pattern, a red-green-blue-white (RGBW) pattern, or the like. The captured image may then be demosaiced to generate missing colors (e.g., interpolation or the like may be performed to generate a full color image from the incomplete color samples from the image sensor), downscaled, remosaiced (e.g., punctuated to form a Bayer or similar pattern image), and saved to main image memory or the like. Such processing may provide a lower resolution (and lower memory usage) image for processing via the image processing pipeline saving on memory usage, memory load, computational requirements, and cost of implementation. However, such processing may affect the image quality (IQ) of the captured images or frames dramatically in terms of resolution, interpolation artifacts, aliasing, and the like.
It may be advantageous to provide low computational complexity, low memory usage, and low power image processing that maintains higher image quality. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present improvements have been needed. Such improvements may become critical as the desire to provide high quality video becomes more widespread.